Syrian army soldiers stands on the ruins of the Temple of Bel in the historic city of Palmyra, in Homs Governorate, Syria in this April 1, 2016.

Syrian troops found a mass grave containing around 40 bodies in Palmyra city, captured from ISIS last Sunday, Syrian state news agency SANA said on Friday.

SANA said the grave, which contained many women and children, was in the north-eastern edge of Palmyra. Some of the bodies had been beheaded.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which monitors the five-year-old Syrian conflict through a network of sources on the ground, said that ISIS had killed a number of people at an earlier time and buried them on the outskirts of the city.

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